Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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Question from Eddie: We’re building a small cottage in our back yard for my mother-in-law to live in during her remaining years.
That will allow her to live more or less independently but still be close by in case she needs us in a hurry.
The question I have is about extending Internet service to the cottage.
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Most families these days have multiple gadgets that connect to the Internet via a WiFi connection.
Whether it’s a smart phone, a tablet, a laptop computer or even a smart TV, it’s probably pretty close to useless in the areas of your home where there isn’t a usable WiFi signal available.
If you have a large home, there are probably several rooms where you simply cannot get your devices to connect to your wireless router, especially if it’s an extra long or multi-story house.
Luckily, there are several things you can do to ensure that your family will be able to use their various devices most anywhere inside your home.
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Question from Fred: I have a 2 year old Lenovo laptop. It was working fine till yesterday evening but now the Wi-Fi won’t work.
I thought it might be a setting, but the Wi-Fi adapter isn’t even showing up in the Device Manager under Windows 11.
Since it won’t work with Windows, I tried booting into Linux Mint (I have a dual-boot setup). Mint won’t recognize the Wi-Fi adapter either so I’m thinking it must be a hardware problem.
Can this be fixed without costing me an arm and a leg? [Read more…]
Question from Deidra: I have grounded my 13 year old daughter for a month for getting into some pretty serious trouble at school.
Part of her “grounding” is a total ban on cell phone and Internet use of any kind.
To enforce that, I’ve had her iPhone shut off and I’ve also turned off the Wi-Fi on our router.
The problem is she’s still finding a way to get on Facebook and talk to her friends because I can see her “liking” stuff and leaving comments. How is that possible? [Read more…]
Question from Debby: A couple of months ago I bought my first smartphone.
I absolutely love it, but I got a huge bill yesterday because they said I went over my monthly data allotment by several gigabytes.
I do watch a lot of videos every day, but I didn’t realize it would cause me to be charged extra.
My daughter said I need to use Wi-Fi instead of cellular data but I don’t want to get hit with a big bill for that too. She said using Wi-Fi is free, but I want to be sure since I can’t afford another huge bill.
So will I be charged extra if I use Wi-Fi to watch my videos? [Read more…]